I’ve been thinking about the uses of history. Perhaps, there’s something remaining from the post in which I talked about the burden of tradition that I sense troubles the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then I came across this essay by Diana Butler Bass, excerpted from her book A People’s History of Christianity.

I will grant that most contemporary Christians know little about the history of Christianity. My experience teaching college students was that for Evangelicals, the two thousand years that separated themselves from the world of the New Testament didn’t exist. Trying to get them to understand the very different historical context of the first century was inordinately difficult and getting them to take interest in the lives of Christians in the intervening centuries was almost impossible. With the demise of denominationalism, few of them were even curious about the historical origins of different understandings of the sacraments and other practices.

Bass seems to link the waning interest in history to the Enlightenment and modernity and sees mainline denominations as especially tempted to do away with it altogether. Certainly the Enlightenment bears some responsibility as seventeenth and eighteenth century thinkers tried to break away from the burdens of the past.

I wonder whether the problem isn’t so much ignoring the past as it is constructing a useful past. History is very much contested. In recent months we’ve had controversies over the changing Texas schoolbook standards with their purging of progressive voices and even those aspects of the past that don’t fit in with a conservative Christian reading of American history (like Thomas Jefferson). We’ve had Southern governors honor Confederate History Month with nary a mention of slavery. For many churches, for many Christians, the past isn’t useful because it drags up too much baggage. That’s true for progressive Christians, Evangelicals, and Roman Catholics.

Tradition can be a burden. The stories we tell help to define us individually and as communities, but it is our responsibility to those communities, today and in the past, to tell those stories honestly. I wonder if that’s not part of what burdens the Archbishop of Canterbury.